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COBOL, z/OS performance measurement, and systems programming updates.

xdg-open

By Arch Brooks on August 8, 2026 in Programming

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xdg-open is the standard XDG utility for opening a file, directory, URL, or document with the desktop's default application.

Basic syntax

xdg-open <file|directory|URL>

Examples:

xdg-open .
xdg-open ~/Applications
xdg-open README.md
xdg-open README.html
xdg-open https://google.com

Check that it is installed

command -v xdg-open

On Gentoo, it normally comes from:

app-misc/xdg-utils

Check:

emerge -pv app-misc/xdg-utils

See what application handles a file

For example, HTML:

xdg-mime query default text/html

Markdown:

xdg-mime query default text/markdown

PDF:

xdg-mime query default application/pdf

Useful for your README workflow

If you convert a Markdown file to HTML:

pandoc README.md \
  --from=gfm \
  --standalone \
  --template=~/Applications/README-template.html \
  --metadata title="README" \
  --highlight-style=github \
  --embed-resources \
  --resource-path=~/Applications \
  -o README.html

then open it immediately:

xdg-open README.html

Or combine them:

pandoc README.md \
  --from=gfm \
  --standalone \
  --template=~/Applications/README-template.html \
  --metadata title="README" \
  --highlight-style=github \
  --embed-resources \
  --resource-path=~/Applications \
  -o README.html && xdg-open README.html

This is generally preferable to hard-coding firefox, chromium, etc., because xdg-open uses whatever application your desktop environment has configured as the default.

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